Thursday, August 09, 2018
Last Day
Today is the last class of this summer's intensives at Berkeley. Yesterday went better than I feared, enthusiasm for the material distracted me from my cold and all went well enough. Today we're screening "An Inconvenient Sequel," Al Gore's recent follow-up to "An Inconvenient Truth," which I taught in the first week. Together, the films form a kind of rhetorical frame within which much of our elaboration and critique of environmentalist theories, practices, identities, arguments has been pitched. Criticism of the many limitations and blindnesses and complacencies and self-promotional weirdnesses of the first, more successful film, are sure giddily to proliferate in our discussion of the second film, now that weeks of our readings have wonderfully radicalized my students on these questions. I have a steep slope of grading ahead and syllabi to whip into shape for the upcoming Fall (already looming less than two weeks ahead), but mostly right now I want to sleep and watch stupid shows on television and stroll the neighborhoods while the summer sun still shines. Even with the worst of my insomnia behind me, this summer slog has left me feeling quite exhausted.
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2 comments:
While I agree with environmental matters with you in your blog, Al Gore has always been an elitist, self-promoting example of only acquiring wealth and power. He leaves an enormous carbon foot print everywhere he travels and lives in a house that burns enough kilowatts of energy to equal a dozen homes. Al Gore has a total net worth of $300 million as of May 2017. He plays on climate change for his own self benefit. This is why Al Gore cannot be trusted as any representative of a true environmental movement. You would do well to remove him from your class lesson in the future.
Those and other critiques (eg, his dismissal and even pathologization of climate debt and climate reparations arguments in the sequel) were at the center of our discussions of the obviously very problematic Gore documentaries, as it happens. But, thanks for sharing your concerns.
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